Many investment, financial, or general service companies offer customers a variety of different products and services. For example, companies such as American Express, Chase, Schwab, AT&T, and/or the like typically offer customers a multitude of products or services, such as financial planning services; credit or charge card products, savings and checking accounts; travel services; reward programs; telephone accounts, utility accounts, internet services, cable services, online brokerage accounts, etc. Many of these products or services are provided by various business groups within the company; while many other products or services may be provided by subsidiaries, third party vendors or contractors. To facilitate the application process for each of these products and/or services, an application processing infrastructure is needed. Typically, each business group, vendor, etc. (collectively referred to herein as the “client”) is responsible for creating and managing the infrastructure for its own product. For example, a company's credit card product infrastructure may be operated and maintained by the company's credit card business group, while the company's investment products and services infrastructure may be operated and maintained by a third party trading partner, or perhaps, by an investment services business group. Therefore, companies, through their various “clients” typically maintain separate and distinct application processing infrastructures or platforms for each product or service offered. As can be appreciated, this results in significant infrastructure cost to the company, where redundant infrastructure development, operation and maintenance is typical in new product development and implementation. Also, because of separate, and often incompatible, infrastructure platforms, the customer, desiring more than one product from a given company, is forced to re-apply for each product, typically re-entering previously entered information.
With the advent of the internet, real-time application processing has become prevalent, where the applicant is allowed to apply online over the company's website. Generally, the online application process involves the applicant submitting his application data to the company over the internet. This is typically accomplished by the applicant completing the company's requested online form fields, such as name, address, occupation, social security number, income, and/or the like. The company then receives this information and generally processes this information manually, applying various application criteria, depending on the particular product or service requested, to determine if applicant is approved for the new product or service. If the applicant is approved, an account is normally set-up and the applicant is sent, via regular mail, the product and notification of approval.
Recent developments to online application processing have involved applying online and obtaining a real-time application decision during the same online session. For recent developments in this area, see U.S. Provisional Application, Ser. No. 60/268,658, filed Feb. 14, 2001, and a currently co-pending utility application, entitled Real-time Brokerage Account Application System and Method, filed on Dec. 20, 2001, both of which are hereby incorporated by reference. This real-time application and decisioning process requires additional infrastructure for processing data, formatting data, communicating data to/from various entities such as credit bureaus, and setting up accounts by associating or assigning account numbers, privileges, credit lines, etc to the approved applicant. This infrastructure typically includes, for example, various web servers, application servers, financial capture systems, accounts receivable/payable systems, securities management systems, trading systems, and the like. As previously noted, each client bears the expense for this infrastructure, where each client typically operates and maintains their respective system infrastructure. As such, a problem with existing infrastructure development is that companies, with multiple clients, offering many products and services, have traditionally incurred substantial costs associated with developing, operating and maintaining separate account application processing infrastructure. Similarly, this redundant infrastructure, has also resulted in requiring the applicant to access different sites or submit information more than once when multiple products are desired.